Elles 2011

Stephen Holden, New York Times: In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns. Read more

Alison Willmore, AV Club: Elles is racy and often sexy, but underneath that simmers an old-school feminist anger. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Both provocative and muddled, the film's a moody, passive-aggressive tract that's buoyed by superior performances and sunk by its own uncertainties. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Writer-director Malgorzata Szumowska breaks past the facile moralizing only once. Read more

Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times: As an essay on women's roles in society and cross-generational female desire, the film provides many questions with no easy answers. Read more

John Anderson, Newsday: This is not an entirely new idea. Nor does "Elles" offer any new insights into either domestic slavery or sex work. But it does offer a lot of sex, which for some will be just fine. Read more

Mark Jenkins, NPR: The sex scenes are attention-getting, but Elles is most remarkable as a naturalistic portrait of a woman. Read more

V.A. Musetto, New York Post: Szumowska provides lurid scenes of perverted sex, but she offers no new insight into the sordid world of prostitution and the dangers sex workers face. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: "Elles" has a surprisingly deep performance in a disappointingly shallow movie. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Binoche is the disappointment. More than half the problem is that the script, co-written by the director, gives her little to do but fret and mope. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: This Paris-based film from Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska is a fairly unengaging journalism procedural shellacked with a veneer of elliptical, complicated symbolism. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Elles" is provocative company, but it leaves us feeling hustled. Read more

Jon Frosch, The Atlantic: Director Malgorzata Szumowska seems intent on drowning her film and her leading lady in campy erotic imagery. Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: It feels like a portrait of a fleeting bourgeois crisis, something Binoche performs well but which feels skin deep when the film is flirting with more fleshy issues. Read more

David Fear, Time Out: Titillation and tentative stabs at gender studies do not a cogent cri de coeur make. It's simply a provocation that's all hopped up with nowhere to go. Read more

Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic: One of her (Binoche's) lesser choices. Read more

Benjamin Mercer, Village Voice: It's entirely too much for co-writer/director Malgoska Szumowska to coherently flesh out in an hour and a half, especially with so much time dedicated just to the state of arousal. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. Read more